Erotica 101

Thank you for the interest shown by clicking on my essay. I hope you find it interesting, perhaps entertaining. As you will discover, it is also a preview of hundreds of pages that I have written for my own enjoyment. Hundreds more pages have been written since, lots of fun. A couple of stories have already been posted. I shall submit more. Positive responses would be a nice incentive.

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It started, of course, with reading: "Lolita" and "Lady Chatterley's Lover" when they became available, which tells you something about my age. I am still surprised that I actually had the nerve to buy them. You may not consider those books erotic literature, but back then, for a virgin male, they were pretty strong stuff. Yes, there were virgin late teenagers back then, who had only kissed someone's sister on New Year's Eve - more been kissed by her.

Then in college, one day I discovered a copy of Frank Harris's "My Life and Loves" lying on the grill to the basement window below my ground floor room, maybe disposed of quickly by someone upstairs when a girl was in his room. It was my good luck that the book was lying with the title face up, and I immediately rescued it. It is a very interesting autobiography and for me very educational, even though I was no longer a virgin.

A couple of years later, I bought "My Secret Life," and then many years later on a trip to California, I bought two collections of erotic short stories by women authors. They were really good. Of course, I had thumbed through some cheap paperbacks, but the exaggerated descriptions of breasts and cocks turned me off. Those female writers got it right, and the lesbian experiences were also very entertaining.

But I was disappointed with one heterosexual scene, wanting her to let him come in her mouth. I fixed that, my first venture into writing erotica. Using my first or second computer, I rewrote and extended the scene and reformatted the text to paste in the book. It's still around somewhere.

By that time, I was more thinking about it than doing it, recalling good times and some that remained unconsummated: times I may have disappointed her by not being forward enough: too many, more than the fingers on one hand. I hope it wasn't that many. Maybe in hindsight, I was making too great assumptions about what might have happened, if ....

It was a lot of fun spinning out the what-ifs on my computer, as everyone here can imagine. Then I discovered Literotica. Vladimir Nabokov got to tell us what Lolita did in his discrete prose that avoided all the specific words, but here one just has to imagine what girls and guys do until they are eighteen. I had to discard some of my ideas.

One of my characters was eighteen, luckily, and for him too.

Perhaps I should point out here that all this happens in the last half of the 1960s. If you weren't around back then, you'll have to take my word for it: most eighteen year-olds knew less about sex than younger teenagers do today, not that they hadn't been very curious for a couple of years, and some willing to find out. The pill wasn't easily available to unmarried girls, but they could get it, but rubbers/condoms were usually a necessity, and HIV was still unknown.

The book, "The Joy of Sex," hadn't been published, but Masters and Johnson's "Human Sexual Response," a more clinical work, had been, and opened a lot of eyes. (I was tempted to type a word that rhymes with eyes - probably it did.) But a great deal was still not common practice, only snickered about by late teenagers - and prohibited by state laws. Affordable VCRs were still a thing of the future, as were the porno films that they made easily available. If someone had already known anything about what Linda Lovelace was going to do in 1972, I doubt that anyone came out and said: "Oh yeah, someone did that to me." Guys were very lucky if a girl wanted to do anything in that respect, even let him do it.

Back to my lucky eighteen year-old, a first person character: I had let him have an ideal "first time" on Fire Island with a woman almost twice his age, married, out there alone during the week. They spend the best part of four days together, getting way beyond just his first time, she even tries something she hadn't done before. Later, he always thinks of her as his Diotima. During that week, he meets a couple of prep school girls on the beach who invite him to a party on Friday night and beforehand to hamburgers in the house they are staying in - parents partying somewhere else. They never make it to the party, but the girls with his willing and now experienced help succeed in meeting their class goal of having gone all the way before returning to school.

Back in school, they correspond with him. Eventually in a mutual letter, in alternating sentences they tell him about how they end up doing what he had enjoyed doing with each of them They invite him to their school's play, but the action is all in his motel room, fulfilling their speculations about what a threesome could do. They correspond further, which results in something that entertains prep school students in several schools the following spring.

By this stage, he has already begun tutoring a girl from a disbanded story, and they get closer. Not anticipating that she has all the experience she has, he is surprised, and she is surprised, wondering about his experience - but both very pleasantly surprised. When he invites her to sporting event that they don't attend, that gets clarified, also what she is doing with her girlfriend. She is, of course, pleased to hear that he already knows girls who enjoy it together.

A couple of years later, when he is in college, he meets one of the prep school girls again and they pick up where they left off and exchange stories, especially hers about a weekend double date with identical twins.

The next summer, his younger sister talks him into chaperoning her for a week on Fire Island. When she asks him how grown-ups really kiss, she learns, and ... well, ... I'm going to have to do some rewriting.

REMEMBER, this is all fiction; if it wasn't written, it didn't happen, regardless of what the imaginative reader infers.

The following week, his summer job in the city starts, while their parents are on the island with his sister, leaving him alone with Martha, the family's Norwegian au pair. After the first night, they joke about trying to make up for her winter of abstinence. Do his parents have misgivings about their being left alone? They do ....

The following week, Martha is alone on Fire Island with his sister, but you are probably not going to hear about that.

There is an epilogue about him and his sister that picks up again when she is in college, then years later when they both are married and have children.

After another week back at his job, he hits it off with Sandy, another summer intern at the company. A play on words results in their not sharing a beer but rather a shower. As she says: "I guess we don't have to worry about what we're going to watch on TV." They don't - for the rest of the summer - even when her airline stewardess flatmate is there. It gets more interesting when Sandy's brother, Randall, joins them for the last ten days.

When the threesome have a reunion after Christmas, they talk about their experiences since September. Sandy has no problem returning to her boyfriend, who spent the summer travelling in Europe, but she also has a girlfriend - who was only a classmate before. To know what Sandy would tell about them, I had to "hear" their stories.

I let her boyfriend tell her his experiences in detail. When he and his friend have given up hope that they will meet any girls, they meet two Dutch students who fulfil the stories they had heard about European girls' being more liberal. But that is nothing compared with the three nights at a camp site near Venice: the first one with two Australian girls in the boys' small tent, and then with the four of them together with those girls' other two tent mates in their larger tent. I let my imagination run away with me.

Sandy's college classmate, Barbara, has a summer job found via someone in her father's fraternity network, a family man with two daughters, but they and his wife are in Europe for the summer. The end of this summer affair is sweetly poignant, if I say so myself. Even I shed a tear while writing it. It is already posted: "Whoosh, Bang!"

Backing up a little, the week with Martha and my first person character generates emotional involvement that wasn't anticipated by me, but that's what happens as characters develop; they take on a life of their own, and if they spend a week making love, it's likely that some of the emotion is left over.

To paraphrase what Ibsen said about his characters: to start with, they are strangers to him; during the first revision, they become acquaintances; during the second revision, they become close friends with now familiar voices that speak by themselves.

Maybe Ibsen didn't express it just like that, and I am not Ibsen - nor a writer of anything other than the stories hinted to above. I expect that some writers here will recognize Ibsen's description of the process. Because I like repartee, my characters also enjoy it and are sometimes wittier that than most of us manage to be - not having the chance to twice revise our words. Sometimes, however, there are ellipses, maybe non sequiturs, mixed tenses and other less than perfect phrases that I could have corrected, but that is how the characters spoke.

Some people may prefer to write or read lots of different words for body parts. I don't think that is how most people actually think or talk, so my characters, being generally well brought up, use a limited vocabulary. They aren't likely to use the the four-letter C-word until they are in the "throes of passion" (an expression that seldom appears in the stories, since I try to get that across in more descriptive terms). And when they have orgasms or want one - as they often do - they still use the four-letter verb. I just checked on "etymonline," the three-letter word apparently wasn't used as a verb before 1973, and I don't use it as a noun.

If I still have your attention, perhaps I should explain that I eschew unnecessary descriptions of persons or surroundings, as do many others on Literotica. If readers want to think that she has D-cup breasts and long, platinum blond hair, or that he has an over-sized cock and a six-pack abdomen, that is fine. Others - like me - may be chagrined by the implication that more than what they have is important. Or it could raise unfulfilled expectations - probably of persons who shouldn't be clicking on this website.

Such readers may be disappointed when they discover how I do occasionally describe her breasts, maybe not anyone's ideal - not always mine either. If she doesn't have to wear a bra because she isn't so well endowed, that can still be attractive under a silk blouse. Of course, there are some I enthuse about, maybe inspired by those of another teenager I knew back then, who was approached by Playboy.

Hmm! I wrote the above a couple of years ago, and some has been revised. I just wrote and posted a non-erotic short story inspired by that teenager: "Tobacco." In the meantime, I have also spun out many pages about Martha, now back in Norway, and her cousin and his girlfriend, and several more persons, and more siblings, ....

Will I be willing and able to upload much of this? That depends on readers' responses, and my figuring out how to split up 150 page files into 17 page chapters, three Literotica pages.